


[Remix/Rewrite] Almost More Storm Than Sky

by Night-Mare (Aoife)



Series: Secondary Flames and Side Effects [1]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Author loves to chat in the Comments, Flame Active Character(s), Gen, POV Daniela (Reborn), Pre-Canon, Stormy Sky Xanxus, Timoteo Vongola's A+ Parenting, Unconventional Uses for Dying Will Flames
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-17
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-03 12:19:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11532090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare
Summary: Rewrite ofAlmost More Storm Than Sky. Daniela, the former Ottava stages something of an intervention. Things ripple out from there.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Almost More Storm than Sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8940949) by [Night-Mare (Aoife)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aoife/pseuds/Night-Mare). 



> Like [Omega Skies](http://archiveofourown.org/series/752694), I stalled on this fic and have come back to it close to 350K words after I began. Rather than simply continuing, my brain went 'you can do better'; whether you agree, well, that's up to you.
> 
> This part will be from her PoV, and finish with her death; events after that will be in a sequel, in Squalo's PoV, I think.

Daniela is old and bored and regrets handing the Rings to her son; she’d been tired though when she had, had been mourning the loss of two more of her Guardians, and her son had been an adult, had had a full set of his own. Had been her bright, brilliant boy, with his beautiful bride and his oldest son, a little Sky with so much promise, had had plans, and she had trusted him. She’d withdrawn for a while - even spent time in full seclusion in a Nunnery - when she’d emerged, she’d been steadier, calmer more able to cope with the loss of her own, though she did regret missing the birth of her second grandchild.

But something had changed in her son while she was in seclusion, and it wasn’t a positive change. But the Ring had accepted him, had claimed his Will as it’s own; her Will is no longer the one it cleaves to, and the Laws of the Family are that the Don - or Donna - must be able to bend the Rings to their service. He clings to the Rings though, even when his eldest son reaches his Majority. She tries to say something; but her Son is an obstinate fool and she only has three Guardians now, meaning that if she tries to set her Will against his, she’d fail. And he is the Don; so she settles for quietly spreading a web through the Alliance of women who talk to each other. Who train their Flames, teach their children to _think_ , and does her best to mitigate the damage her son has done - will do - to the Famiglia.

She loses a fourth Guardian to age; her beloved Cloud. It makes her prickly, losing another of her own. She doesn’t know how her son has dealt with replacing two of his Guardians; the idea of doing so makes her stomach churn unhappily. But then he’s not as tightly bonded to his as she was to hers; fighting a war and conceiving a son in celebration of surviving the fascists would do that.

That all means she’s tired and looking for something to amuse herself when her son brings home the street brat he claims is _his_ son. Perhaps he can fool himself; perhaps he can fool the Alliance, but she ran a _brutal_ guerilla campaign. Had had to _learn_ to see what was actually there to survive a World War. Enough men with the ability to actually Activate, that had usable Reserves were traumatised by War to make untrained Mists a _real_ and life-threatening danger.

And after fighting a War, seeing all the peculiar permutations of Flames that had come out of it - having had to fight some of the resulting users and coax others into dormancy or a Famiglia; omertà exists for a _reason_ \- she sees Xanxus’ flames and has to resist the temptation to take her idiot son’s head off. Yes, the boy _looks_ superficially like the portraits assumed to be of a young Ricardo - later Vongola Secondo - but there was both an underlying difference in the bone structure, and the little matter of their own dubious genealogy; after all, the only thing that mattered were Sky Flames and a Will the Rings would accept. She could see why her idiot son wants to claim the boy, but without knowing who the boy truly was, that could be dangerous; it’s almost impossible to tell whether the boy is a Storm or a Sky, and Reserves as deep, and a Will that strong have to come from known lines; it takes several generations of Active Users before they solidify.

Perhaps his mother was a bastard of one of her cousins; it might explain the resemblance, but it’s entirely possible the he represented the culmination of an older cadet or bastard line, with an Active Storm father tipping the balance. And might explain the Flames; no Vongola had been sired or carried by a Storm since Ricardo - who from the descriptions of his parents in some of the oldest journals had _definitly_ had a Stormy mother - and had called his Flames ‘Wrath’; they’d drawn men in like Giotto’s had, but had a destructive edge, and after Giotto had fled he’d got harder, more destructive like many unanchored Storms did.

She resists the temptation to say something to her son in front of the boy; she’s quite content to claim the boy as family _anyway_ ; he ‘feels’ like one. But her son _forbids_ her to say anything about her assumptions to Xanxus himself, presses his Will on her and _binds_ her from doing so. He tries to dissuade her from spending time with the boy, but her Mist is better than Bouche Croquant; or at least the woman is more creative with her Flames, and forbidding a pubescent boy _anything_ is a fantastic way to get them to do it. And she provides a sanctuary from the tutors and other adults trying to beat the street brat out of Xanxus.

It means that Xanxus relaxes around her, wants to _see_ her Flames; they’re not a named variant like his own, but her Secondary is strong enough to influence her Primary in a similar way, unlike her son or her other grandsons. And his relaxation around her means that she, at least, can _feel_ the empty hollow at the core of her youngest grandson Flames, the match to the fragile places on their surface, and that makes her blink in astonishment. Xanxus truly is as much Storm as he is Sky, which has the potential to be an absolute flaming _mess_. The balance is close enough that she’s pretty damn sure the reason for his instability, his volatile temper - both above and beyond what might be expected, even in a pubescent boy - is the fact that he’s been Active long enough and under enough threat, that his Storm craves a Sky of it’s own, a place of Sanctuary as much as his Sky craves Guardians to _give_ Sanctuary, too.

It's been years since she had a Storm, and given a choice she wouldn't seek another, had never _wanted_ to replace her own, but to stabilise the boy, something needed to be done, and she was the only one who seemed to even realise there was something _wrong_. She’d tried to be generous, tried to believe her son had seen the issue, had hoped, perhaps that he was hoping that Xanxus might bond to one of his natural sons as _their_ Storm, but that would be an exceedingly generous version of events, given her son’s current bout of stupidity. It was far more likely he just hadn’t noticed, and given the geas he’d ‘misplaced’ on her, she wasn’t inclined to correct him. Not when she could help Xanxus herself; she wasn’t sure she _trusted_ her son with the boy.

She reaches out a thread of her Sky flame to him the next time Xanxus comes to visit her, has her remaining two Guardians, her Mist and her Rain alert, just in case, but the boy at least doesn’t _reject_ her outright; doesn’t flare his Flames aggressively and try and drive her away. In fact he tilts his head like he's listening to her call. He doesn't take her up on the offer - given the stupidity of her son and the fact that all three of her grandsons have been struggling to attract strong Flame Users, she suspects it's the first such call the boy has actually heard - but he does keep returning, and he's more stable around her than he is outside of her wing of the Iron Fort, his Flames less wild, his temper more controlled.

But even offering a light bond to Xanxus reminds her, painfully, of her Storm Guardian and his death - and the death of her favourite, her Lightning - at the hands of Benito's thugs. She suspects he can taste that grief, that pain, in her call, but he’s not the soft and pampered child of peace, not like her other grandsons, and he appreciates the offer, and its honesty, and eventually, he accepts.

Her son claims Xanxus has very little of their famed intuition, but she disagrees. The boy has honed it, bent it to keeping him alive on the streets and has learned the hard way to keep its murmurs secret. She suspects it has whispered to him that all she wants is to see him grow, and grow strong; nothing else explains the conscious effort the boy puts into shoring up his side of the bond, strengthening and feeding it till it’s as strong as any of her other bonds have been, despite her intent. (He buoys and bolsters her, dragging her through several brief brushes with fading, and she’s not sure whether to be grateful or angry with him for the way he demands she continue to _live_.)


	2. The Acquisition of a Rain

She is not at all surprised that it’s a Superbi that her youngest grandson, her Storm - it has been a painfully long time since she has a Storm, and she had forgotten how good it felt to have a Storm’s Flames wrapped around her, shielding the ragged edges of her Sky from harm - drags home, and declares is _his_ ; the boy isn’t _yet_. The two of them have a way to go before their bond is robust enough that her idiot Son won’t be able to break it out of spite at how none of his _actual_ sons have caught a Superbi. Most Vongola Skies end up with at least one Superbi Guardian; they’re loyal, brilliant and their Flame reserves deep. But for a Superbi, his Rain is loud and flashy - the profound love for his blades his blade and his Sky is _all_ Superbi, though. She grins at the memory of her Cloud, a Superbi, who would have _loved_ to have met the newest Superbi Guardian; none of her other grandsons have managed to attract one yet.

He hides that devotion to his Sky though, along with a first class strategic mind, behind a mask, and the mask he wears - the ear-shattering ‘Voooiii’ exclamations and his entirely genuine attachment to his Sword, profound but not as obsessive as he pretends - would deceive all but those most used to looking for hidden depths and nuances. But she’d honed her ability to see through illusions in the midst of a ‘total’ war, when a misstep could - had - cost lives. That was a line of thought she couldn’t afford to go any further down; that way lay madness, painful memories and Rage that would make her grandson’s Wrath seem mild - and if she fell to that now, with how Xanxus has reinforced their bond, he’d fall too, would find it far harder to reign his Stormy nature in. And she refused to do that to him. Not now he’d _proven_ his potential. She shuts the thoughts of her original Storm and her sweet Lightning and their deaths back into the mental box that she _has_ to keep them in to stay sane.

What does surprise her a little - Storms and Clouds are rarely the _best_ of friends, though her own had learned to tolerate each other - is that the Superbi boy is a Cloudy Rain, with enough of both of his flame-types' vices that he might be as balanced as her Stormy Xanxus was. The ways the boys dance around each other, and the internal conflict in the Superbi boy - Squalo - between the instincts that came with having two such strong Flames only amplified her certainty that he was as much Cloud as Rain. The two of them were behaving more like Cloud and Sky to her eyes; the back and forth, Squalo’s adoration of her Xanxus’s strength and Rage, those were the things a Cloud looks for in a Sky, not a Rain.

When she realises where the dance that the boys are engaged in will lead, that her Xanxus’s Sky was more viciously possessive and _hungrier_ than hers, she almost wishes that Squalo had been a girl. The two of them look at each other with such hunger that there was only one way their bond would be sealed and it would make life easier for her grandson, to have his Cloud as his Donna. But rewriting fate had never been within her reach, even when she still wore the Vongola Sky Ring; that according to the family’s myths was something that the missing Mare Rings could do. But Sesto and Settimo - her grandfather and father - had both searched for those Rings in vain, so instead she sends the young okama Sun her idiot son is trying to foist on her - he will not believe her that she doesn’t _want_ more Guardians - to talk to both boys. She’s had some full and frank - and filthy - discussions with Lussuria, and she’s got no desire to deal with the fall out if her Storm took more from his Rain Cloud than Squalo had been willing and prepared for his Sky to take, and manages to break their bond before it even finishes forming; but better the warning comes from Lussuria, who would be able to explain the nuances rather than from her. If she tried to explain sex to the boys, they’d be _horrified_. Especially as she would not be surprised if Squalo made some _grand_ gesture soon, some acknowledgement that he was Xanxus’s Cloud; he was overdue to claim himself a territory of some sort.

And for a Sky, there were only two response to such a gesture, such an acknowledgement of the fact they were harmonising - acceptance or rejection, but the nature of that acceptance or rejection lay in the hands of the Sky harmonised with. And for as Stormy a Sky as Xanxus was, the options were a little more base than they'd ever been for her. The boys would fuck, would fight or would feed other hungers; while she'd finally harmonised with one of her Guardians over a shared piece of chocolate in a freezing mountain hide out, the boys were made for the Varia - she’d be encouraging them both to spend some time in that Compound when they were of age; Xanxus had killed in his mother’s defence; would kill again, and she’d seen Squalo spar, seen his nascent blood thirst, and it would be better to turn those tendencies to serve the Familiga - and had more esoteric, less innocent hungers to feed. She knew what someone _made_ for the Varia looked like; four of her six original Guardians had been from amongst the Varia, and the other two only hadn’t been because they’d been civilians before she claimed them. Or, of course one of the boys could turn and flee, but she's never seen a Storm - or a Cloud for that matter - flee from _anything_.

Squalo vanishing for several days, and then returning, sans his dominant hand only confirms his status as a Cloud for her; he has carved out a territory for his Sky to claim. She’s amused that he had the Will and the skill for that territory to be the _Varia_ ; but managing the Famiglia's more insane and skilled Flames users, the ones with a taste for violence and other mischief will keep her Storm occupied. And he might find his other Guardians amongst their number; she couldn’t see her Xanxus settling for the milquetoasts her son was trying to encourage her other grandsons to accept.

She wonders if she should warn her son and his ‘Intelligence’ officer - Sawada was an idiot in her opinion, but she also understood needing to neutralise a threat, and her son had at least had the sense to retain her field commander to actually run the agency, the Arcobaleno Lal Mirch - that they were playing with fire, that the Guardian that had just surrendered himself into her grandson's hands is as capable of wearing the Cloud Ring as he is of wearing the Rain. Not that she disapproves of Squalo’s decision to hide his nature; a Cloud would be watched in ways that an apparently obsessive Rain _wouldn’t_ be.

But she decides it's their own fault if they both fail to look past her son and his Rain Cloud’s act; even if none of his sons have a complete ‘set’, she’s firmly of the opinion that her idiot son _should_ hand off command to the next generation, spend some time considering his actions, perhaps even retreat from the world for a while, the way she did, but he's clinging onto power. If she’s generous, it’s because he’s loathe to see his sons set their Wills against Giotto and the others within the Ring and fail; failure could be fatal, and her son was far softer than she was - or it’s because even his oldest has yet to complete his set - but she has a sinking feeling that it’s just an inability to let go.

Talbot owes her a favour; her death gift for her Storm will be his own set of rings; ones that will allow him and his to reach their full potential, even if her son’s ignorance would see her Xanxus stifled.


	3. A 'Good' Death

Xanxus thrives with the Varia. For all he and Squalo are only fourteen and fifteen respectively, they do remarkably well. Not all Skies make good Dons; some would make far better homemakers and spiritual healers, but Xanxus is definitely not one of those Skies who would do better out of a leadership role. He’s _thrived_ under the ‘attention’ of the Famiglia's assassins - when attention encompasses frequent attempts to kill him, his Rain Cloud and anyone standing too close to them - and managed to win them over. She’d given him the plans for her father’s guns as a reward for doing so without killing _too_ many of them; she’d be intrigued to see what he manages to do with them. He definitely favoured firearms, whereas she’d found them too noisy for a guerilla campaign. A crossbow had served her better.

But with her Stormy Xanxus living in the Varia Compound, she miss his presence in the Iron Fort. It aches to have her Storm - far more tightly bonded to her than she’d _ever_ intended - so far away from her, but he’s _happy_ ; her bond to him thrums with it. She refuses to call him to the Fort, where he’d be back within range of her son’s sniping tongue and dragged into the womanising and carousing of her other grandsons. But with him so far away - and at her age, even having him only an hour away counted as distant - there was a price. Perhaps if Xanxus had been Cloud, rather than Storm, it would have taken longer for that price to make itself known, but he wasn’t.

It took several weeks for her to realise what was going on. Skies were rare enough, and their lifestyle rarely allowed for a ‘natural’ death. She knew of only three that had even made it to old age - and all three had done it by cunning and guile. Her Reserves had been silting up, reducing for _years_ ; it had been one of the reasons she had been willing to hand over command of the Familiga to her son. But the drain on them, the drain from simply living, now outweighed her Reserve’s capability to refill itself. There were things that she could do to stave off death; she could take new Guardians, allow their bonds to cover the leaking scars of the torn out bonds to her Cloud, to her Sun and to her Lightning and she could stop her Mist and Rain drawing from her to replenish their own dwindling reserves. That would buy her a little time, like Xanxus’s decision to shore up his side of his bond to her had, but it would come at a cost.

Her Mist and her Rain were fading themselves; stopping their drain on her own far larger reserves would kill them. She was selfish; she’d already seen four of her Guardians die, and she didn’t want to live if the cost was killing the remaining two. When the little she had left was gone, she’d slip first into unconsciousness, and then within a few hours die without a Flame transfusion. If her son found out that she’d reached that point, he would try to keep her alive, but she’d rather chose the time of her death, would rather not see what he might do in his desperation.

She _knows_ she's dying when she summons Squalo without Xanxus. She’s _choosing_ the time and nature of her death _herself_ ; yes, she regrets it, but she refuses to turn into a ‘vampire’, to keep herself alive at the expense of her Guardians. Her Mist and Rain _will_ follow her into death, and her bond with Xanxus was deep and strong enough - the boy was stubborn that way - that if he wasn’t a Sky too, didn’t already have a Cloudy Guardian, she’d worry about him following her, too. As it was, she worried about him; worried him about sliding into Dissonance, losing himself in his grief. So it’s two birds with a single stone, for her to teach Squalo how to access his Primary Flame; she’ll drain what’s left of her Reserves and ‘only’ have appeared to have fallen asleep, exhausted after a conversation with the young Superbi. She’d even set up a cover story, that she was telling the boy about her Cloud, his great-uncle. And with what he planned to teach him, her grandson’s first Guardian would be able to keep her Stormy boy alive and out of dissonance.

She teaches him things that no-one had thought to show him, yet. Even though her Storm was Flame Active, it was a rough, raw, self-taught thing that left him in no position to teach others - even if he'd had the aptitude for it; she’d been so disappointed in her son for not ensuing Squalo was properly trained. She’d had her Rain dispatch a number of letters that morning, including one making it clear to the Superbi Don that her son had been derelict in his duties to Squalo and Xanxus - she’d take the opportunity her death presented to _thoroughly_ embarrass her idiot son in front of his peers. If he was going to claim the boy as his own, it came with _responsibilities_. So there would be more private instruction, on his Famiglia's techniques for her Storm’s Rain Cloud; they’d been Flame Users for a very long time the Superbi. Mostly Rains with a smattering of Clouds and Mists, and Squalo was _very_ much one of theirs.

It exhausts her to teach him how to summon and maintain his ‘technical’ primary flame - the only reason that it’s his Rain, that that’s the one that comes easier, is years of being told that was what he was influencing him - but she pushes herself to do so anyway; it's quite possibly that Squalo and his Flames will be the only thing that will save Xanxus from going into Dissonance when she dies. She had tried to stop him forming a full Guardian bond with her, but her ridiculous Stormy teen had _insisted_ , and she’d been unable to stop him. By the time Squalo has left her sick room, he has a sparkling blue flame that was willing to dance over his hands, two rings on his flesh-and-blood hand, and has learned several of the more useful and less well known Rain tricks, as well as the hypothetical techniques that would apply to his Cloud Flames when he managed to wake them, and she had one less regret.

She dies mere hours later. It’s a good, quiet death, easy, painless.

* * *

(She opens her eyes to be greeted by her predecessors.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I decided to end this here, and pick up the next part of the rewrite in a new fic, as there's a change in PoV.


End file.
